The mood of the album stands in contrast with the band's more mellow and hugely successful follow-up, Aja.

In common with other Steely Dan albums, The Royal Scam is littered with cryptic allusions to people and events both real and fictional. In a BBC interview in 2000,[2] Becker and Fagen revealed that "Kid Charlemagne" is loosely based on Augustus Owsley Stanley, the notorious drug "chef" who was famous for manufacturing hallucinogenic compounds, and that "Caves of Altamira" is about the loss of innocence, the narrative about a visitor to the Cave of Altamira who registers his astonishment at the prehistoric drawings.

The album was re-issued by MCA Records in 1979 following the sale of the ABC Records label to MCA.

Contents

The album cover shows a sleeping man in a suit apparently dreaming of skyscraper-beast hybrids. The cover was created from a painting by Larry Zox and a photograph by Charlie Ganse, and was originally created for Van Morrison's unreleased 1975 album, Mechanical Bliss.[citation needed] In the liner notes for the 1999 remaster of the album, Fagen and Becker claim it to be "the most hideous album cover of the seventies, bar none (excepting perhaps Can't Buy a Thrill)."

In the song "Everything You Did," a lyric says, "turn up The Eagles, the neighbors are listening." Glenn Frey of the Eagles said, "Apparently Walter Becker's girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time. I think it drove him nuts. So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day and that was the genesis of the line." Given that the two bands shared a manager (Irving Azoff) and that the Eagles proclaimed their admiration for Steely Dan, this was more friendly rivalry than feud.[3]

Later that year in a nod back to Steely Dan for the free publicity,[4] and inspired by Steely Dan's lyric style,[5] the Eagles penned the lyrics, "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" in their hit "Hotel California". Frey commented, "We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, so 'Dan' got changed to 'knives,' which is still, you know, a penile metaphor."[6]

Timothy B. Schmit, who sang background vocals on "The Royal Scam" would later join The Eagles.

The album was not as highly rated upon its release as its predecessors with most reviewers noting that it did not seem to represent any musical advancement. In contrast, the original Rolling Stone review was more positive,[11] and ultimately the magazine gave it five stars in a later Hall of Fame review.[10]

^Quotes: Here are quotes from Don and others about his career Feldermusic. "At the time we were also quite fond [of] Steely Dan and listening to a lot of their records. And one of the things that impressed us about Steely Dan was that they would say anything in their songs and it did not have to necessarily make sense you know"

^Excerpted from the 2006 book Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed, published by Three Rivers Press, written by Gavin Edwards.